Oracle Blog

...and other things that annoy me

Friday Jan 29, 2010

As many folks know, Sun and GreenBytes have been having some discussions related to
deduplication technology in ZFS. In a large part, this was due to some unfortunate
communication breakdowns between us.

In the beginning, the fact that GreenBytes was able to develop their own implementation
of deduplication on top of ZFS, was what started our discussions. This is a powerful
engineering accomplishment, especially considering the fact that they did this without the
help of the ZFS team.

Over the months of 2008, the engineers at GreenBytes and Sun had several productive
discussions about deduplication and ZFS. Ultimately, we decided that each engineering
team had different needs we needed to meet with regards to the behavior and
implementation of deduplication in ZFS.

While each of our deduplication technologies are unique, they have different strengths,
which is what Open Source development is all about - nobody has to wholly agree on the
right approach, and is free to do their own thing. I think both Sun and GreenBytes have a
lot of respect for each other's engineering teams due to these discussions over the past
two years.

Sun definitely looks forward to possible forthcoming contributions to OpenSolaris and
ZFS in the future from GreenBytes, as they represent the spirit of Open Source that Sun
hoped to cultivate with the CDDL.

We're glad we were able to resolve this misunderstanding, and we are looking forward to
cooperatively working together through the OpenSolaris community in the future.